The course is divided into five (almost) three-week sections. See the syllabus for
details.

The class meets in Edison 152 on Tuesdays and Thrusdays from 6:00 p.m. to 7:50
p.m. There are no classes on Tuesday, 9 March, and Thursday, 11 March, due to
Spring Break. The last day to withdraw from class with a W on your transcript
is Monday, 29 March.

R. Clayton, Howard B-13, rclayton@monmouth.edu, 732 263 5522. My
office hours for CS 509 are from 5 to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays and 4 to 5
p.m. on Thursdays in my office. I'm also usually happy to talk to you any time
you can catch me; setting up an appointment is recommended, see
my schedule for available times.

There will be five tests and five programming assignments, one assignment and
test for each of the five sections; see the syllabus for the schedule. Tests will
be given in class, and are closed book with no notes; calculators and computers
will not be necessary. The tests are cumulative, covering everything taught up
to and including the class before the test. Tests should take no more than an
hour to complete, and will be given in the first hour of class. Test answers
will be made available off the syllabus.

Each programming assignment will be made available on the syllabus at the start of
the associated section. Programming assignments are due two weeks from the day
the assignment is issued. My version of the programming assignment will be
made available on the syllabus after all the assgnments have been received.

The final grade is a weighted average of test scores and programming assignment
grades; the programming assignments grades make up 85% of the final grade and
the test grades make up the remaining 15%.

The usual grade ranges are in effect:

95

<=

A

90

<=

A-

< 95

86.6

<=

B+

< 90

83.3

<=

B

< 86.6

80

<=

B-

< 83.3

76.6

<=

C+

< 80

73.3

<=

C

< 76.6

70

<=

C-

< 73.3

F

< 70

All grades are kept with one digit of precision to the right of the decimal
point and 0.05 rounded up. No grades are adjusted to a curve; that means, for
example, that 89.9 is always a B+, never an A-.

In addition, you should also have a C++ book handy so you can learn new C++
features and resolve some of the finer points for C++ features about which you
already know. I will be using C++ How to Program by Deitel and Deitel - the
textbook for 500 and 503 - but any reasonably complete C++ book would do as
well.

I've also put together a bibliography of C++ and programming
books I've found helpful.

You should feel free to send me e-mail. Unless I warn you beforehand, I'll
usually respond within a couple of hours during the usual work days; if I don't
respond within a day, resend the message.

Mail relevant to the class will be stored in a
hyper-mail
archive. If your message is of general interest to the class, I'll store it,
suitably stripped of identification and along with my answer, in the archive.

People who need assistance or accommodations above and beyond what is usually
provided in class should contact the University's ADA/504 coordinator to get
those needs met. See me or the
Disability
Services page for more details.

I have no class attendance policy; you may attend class or not as you see fit.
However, I hold you responsible for knowing everything that goes on in class;
"I wasn't in class for that." is not an acceptable excuse for a wrong
answer, or for giving no answer at all.

My attendance policy applies only to lecture attendance; it does not apply to
other kinds of attendance which may be required for the course. Repeated
failures to meet the attendance expectations set for tests, meetings, projects,
labs or other forms of course work will have a bad influence on your grade.

I deal with suspected cheating by failing first and asking questions later.
Although cheating has many forms, I generally consider cheating to be any
attempt to claim someone else's work as your own; also, I consider both the
provider and the user of the work guilty of cheating. See the chapters on
Academic Information and the Student Code of Conduct in the Student Handbook
for more details.

I recognize and encourage a student's sacred right to complain about their
grade. There are, however, a few rules under which such complaining should
take place, and those students who don't follow the rules will be less
successful in their complaints than those students who do follow the rules.

First, the only complaint that matters is that something got marked wrong when
it was actually right. When you come to complain, be prepared to present, in
explicit detail, what it is you did and why you think it's right.

Second, complaints about a particular test or assignment are only valid until
the next test or assignment is due; after that point the book is permanently
closed on all previous test or assignment grades.

Assignments must be turned in by their due date; assignments turned in after
their due date are late. You should contact me as soon as possible if you need
to negotiate a due-date extension. The longer you wait to negotiate, the less
likely it is you'll be successful; in particular, you have almost no chance of
getting an extension if you try for one the day before the due date, and you
have no chance of getting an extention on the due date.

A late assignment is penalized five points a day for each day it's late. I use
a 24-hour clock running from midnight to midnight to measure days; note this
means that an assignment handed in the day after it's due is penalized ten
points: five for the day it was due and five for the next day.

There may occasionally be a conflict between taking a test and doing something
else, particularly among those working full time. If you're going to be out of
town, or on jury duty, or whatever, on a test day, let me know beforehand and
we'll discuss a make-up test.

A make-up test must be scheduled to be taken by the date of the test following
the missed test (or the final exam if you miss the last test). If a missed
test is not made up by the time of the next test, you get a zero for the missed
test.

There will be only one make up given per missed test. If more than one person
misses the same test, those people will have to coordinate among themselves to
pick a mutually agreeable date for the make up.

Taligent's
Guide to Designing Programs. Taligent was an IBM-Apple partnership formed in
the early 90s to develop a next generation, object-oriented operating system
(codenamed, at least for a while, "Pink"). The partnership dissolved
without, as far as I know, producing anything apart from documentation.